The Committee of the Regions and the Upgrading of Subnational Territorial Representation

Abstract

The Committee of the Regions (CoR) was foreseen in the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) and actually created in 1994 to provide the Commission with ‘the view from the periphery’. It was conceived as a consultative committee, along the lines of the much older Economic and Social Committee (ESC) that was supposed to feed the opinions of the workers, the employers, and of civil society on EU policy-making. The events leading to the creation of the CoR have been recounted several times (Van der Knaap 1994; Warleigh 1997). The Committee was created under the impulse of the main European associations of regional and local authorities (particularly the Assembly of European Regions [AER] and the Council of European Municipalities and Regions [CEMR]) and thanks to the additional pressure from the most powerful of all European subnational authorities, the German Länder and the Spanish regions.¹ The goal of these regions was, originally, to recoup at the European level the powers that they enjoyed at home. The creation of the Single European Market in 1986 and the reform of European Regional Development Policy (ERDP) in 1988 had shifted decision-making powers upwards to central governmental actors. In the case of ERDP, later re-named Cohesion Policy, central governmental actors decided in the Council the amount of funds to be devoted to this policy and the criteria according to which the funds should be allocated, thus de facto disempowering those regional authorities that, domestically, were (in some Member States, at least) mandatorily involved in such decisions (Anderson 1991; Benz 1998, 2000).